Incremental Transformation Research Articles

From ‘having the will’ to ‘knowing the way’: Incremental transformation for poverty alleviation among rural women in Bangladesh

Short-term, linear, externally funded, project-based approaches to complex problems like women's poverty in rural Bangladesh are often unsuccessful. Taking a different approach, this paper documents a transdisciplinary action-research methodology that led to sustainable poverty alleviation for rural Bangladeshi women, gradual changes in gender relations at the household and community level and strengthened women's capabilities while simultaneously developing an approach to social entrepreneurship. Defining characteristics of this research process were clear articulation of objectives in which poverty alleviation always received priority, learning cycles in which women were the central actors of the research-action process, and fluid and changing leadership among different stakeholders at different stages in the process. The project demonstrates the strength of action-research in addressing complex challenges, such as poverty alleviation and unequal gender relations. Key lessons for development practice include the need for interventions that take place over a longer time-frame and for a vision of development that is not transformational but comprising small incremental, locally embedded changes and which recognises the role of social capital.

Using triple graph grammars to realise incremental round‐trip engineering

Model-driven software engineering is supported with the help of model transformations. At present, the technology for defining and executing uni-directional batch transformations seems to be fairly well developed, while bidirectional and incremental transformations are more difficult to handle. In this study, the authors present a bidirectional and incremental transformation tool for round-trip engineering between class diagrams and Java source code. Unlike other approaches, the tool may work with arbitrary Java code rather than only with source code following specific coding conventions. For its realisation, they selected triple graph grammars (TGGs) because they allow to generate bidirectional incremental transformations from a single set of undirected rules. When applying TGGs, they observed several strengths and weaknesses which are also discussed in this study.

Creating the medical school of the future through incremental curricular transformation: the Stanford Healthcare Innovations and Experiential Learning Directive (SHIELD)

Creating the medical school of the future through incremental curricular transformation: the Stanford Healthcare Innovations and Experiential Learning Directive (SHIELD)

Analysing energy intensity trends and decoupling of growth from energy use in Indian manufacturing industries during 1973–1974 to 2011–2012

This paper has two research objectives: first, it derives and analyses energy intensity trends for seven energy intensive manufacturing industries and the aggregate manufacturing sector in India for the period 1973–1974 to 2011–2012 and compares the same with best practice benchmarks. Second, based on Index Decomposition Analysis, it studies the extent to which the energy efficiency has contributed in the decoupling of industrial activity growth from growth in energy use. The study finds faster decline in energy intensity in all the seven industries during the recent years (1998–1999 to 2011–2012). Aluminium, cement and fertilizer industries are found to operate close to the global best-practice energy intensities with transformational changes in process technology. Iron and steel and pulp and paper are found to be lagging behind with only incremental transformation in technology in place. The decomposition results show that activity growth is the major driver of growth in energy demand with marginal impact coming from structural change. However, declining energy intensity has been able to neutralize a major portion of the growing energy demand resulting in decoupling trends, especially in recent years, with more energy efficiency-related voluntary and mandatory policies in place).

Round-trip Engineering UML Class Models and Java Models

Model transformations constitute the key technology for model-driven software development, a software engineering discipline which became more and more important during the last decade. While tool support for unidirectional batch transformations is rather mature, bidirectional and incremental transformations are only weakly investigated. Nevertheless, several usage scenarios demand for incremental and bidirectional transformations, like round-trip engineering between UML class models and Java source code. This paper presents a bidirectional transformation between UML class models and a Java model which is obtained from Java source code. The transformation is written in QVT Relations, a declarative model transformation language provided by the OMG. While the case study demonstrates that it is possible to specify bidirectional transformations between heterogeneous metamodels in a single relational specification, it also reveals some inherent limitations of the language and the corresponding tool support.

Urban Water Governance for More Inclusive Development: A Reflection on the ‘Waterscapes’ of Durban, South Africa

Post-apartheid policies have tasked Durban’s municipal actors with the responsibility of achieving both inclusiveness and economic growth. However, they are confronted with the deep spatial and socio-economic inequalities resulting from apartheid, as well as the pressure generated by rapid urbanisation. This article analyses Durban’s water governance regime and its spatial expression or ‘waterscape’. eThekwini Water and Sanitation Unit’s (EWS) approach to water and sanitation provision has gained international recognition for its inclusiveness. This article argues that the resulting ‘waterscape’ – understood as the outcome of the interaction of actor coalitions and their power relations, discourses and knowledges, technologies and infrastructures, which are embedded in multiple spaces that come together simultaneously – exemplifies and challenges the notion of inclusiveness. This article reveals that almost universal access to basic water and sanitation has been achieved through incremental transformation, but that this has produced a highly uneven waterscape in Durban.

A virtual repository for linked-data-based disaster management applications

Typical state-of-the-art disaster management information systems (DMIS) cannot support responsive discovery and access of data and information needed to handle unforeseen emergencies. Adding semantics and relations to legacy data and transforming them to linked data (LD) can remove this limitation. The virtual repository presented in this article is a development environment for this purpose: It provides application developers with tools for incremental transformation of legacy data and information in the DMIS into LD as needed by the applications. The virtual repository also provides the applications with support for runtime access of LD created and maintained using its tools.

Incremental transformation of a traditional village in China's Pearl River Delta

Sempre piu nella societa urbana della Cina il lavoro dei progettisti urbani si intreccia con le trasformazioni dei paesaggi metropolitani. Ex villaggi agricoli sono incapsulati dal recente sviluppo urbano; questi villaggi contengono abitazioni tradizionali che sono spesso considerate come obsolete, quindi ritenute inadatte per stili di vita moderni. Tuttavia, a causa del quadro regolativo diverso molti villaggi sono diventati enclave dei lavoratori migranti, in quanto solo in questi villaggi e possibile per loro di accedere ad alloggi a basso costo, anche se non necessariamente di un livello decente. In un laboratorio nel 2013, gli autori hanno sperimentato concetti di design che permettano di incrementare il rinnovo delle abitazioni nei villaggi e forniscano spazi abitativi necessari per un grande numero di lavoratori migranti che attualmente e fuori del mercato immobiliare tradizionale

Predicting the competitive advantage of design projects to dynamically support decisions in product development

Many product development initiatives are planned on the basis of the supposed capability to generate customer satisfaction. However, market and technology conditions can undergo several transformations during the execution of product innovation projects and jeopardise the basic assumptions taken at the beginning of the design cycle. Among changing factors, the observed alternation of radical and incremental transformations of product architectures is viable to influence the success chances of new products. Such an aspect is taken into account in the decision support tool described in the paper, which can be employed to select the most beneficial alternatives in a set of different product ideas.

Iconic eyesores: exploring do-it-yourself preservation and civic improvement at abandoned train stations in Buffalo and Detroit

This inquiry documents two citizen-driven campaigns to reclaim iconic train stations and their adjacent landscapes, assessing their effectiveness as agents of preservation and civic improvement, and potential as catalysts for local development. Examining grassroots efforts to conserve and reuse Buffalo’s Central Terminal and Detroit’s Michigan Central Station and the adjacent Roosevelt Park, it considers a unique form of preservation practice – one devoid of significant public sector funding and the conventional market-based adaptive reuse strategies that are ineffective in declining settings. Driven by idiosyncratic collectives of residents, business owners, cultural entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and planners, these groups coalesce around a shared desire to conserve local landmarks and play an active role in the physical rebuilding of their cities. Their incremental and incomplete transformations are driven by an ethic that transcends both typical market-oriented targets (private sector profits or “pays-for-itself”) and the “fully restored” end states that are the goals of conventional projects. While these acts of reclamation are far from complete, they have the potential to inform similar locally driven efforts in settings of decline.

Fast and standalone Design Space Exploration for High-Level Synthesis under resource constraints

The very high computing capacity available in the latest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) components allows to extend their application fields, in High-Performance Computing (HPC) as well as in embedded applications. This paper presents a new methodology for Design Space Exploration (DSE) in the context of High-Level Synthesis (HLS) for HPC and embedded systems targeting FPGAs. This new methodology provides very quickly an RTL description of the design under resources constraints. An autonomous flow is described, that performs incremental transformations of the input design description. The low complexity of the transformation evaluation, decision and exploration algorithms, associated with a greedy progression, makes this DSE methodology very fast. Moreover, this methodology respects a strict resource constraint given as bare FPGA primitive amounts. Hence, the generated design fits into the targeted FPGA or a partition of it. Such a methodology leads to autonomous, fast and transparent DSE, all these issues known to limit the use of HLS. Results on several benchmarks highlight the capabilities of our DSE methodology. The results show a high generation time speed-up compared to one other existing HLS approach, while preserving correct performance of the generated circuits.

The New Museum Folkwang in Essen. A Contribution to the Cultural and Economic Regeneration of the Ruhr Area?

The “Bilbao effect” shows that major cultural investments can contribute to the regeneration of old industrial cities and regions. Four different contributions can be distinguished: the (1) direct economic effects of such an investment; (2) social functions of a cultural institution which often serves as a point of contact for local and regional elites; (3) symbolic functions as an expression of a new regional identity and (4) cognitive functions, for example, the contribution to regional diversity and the cross-fertilization of ideas. Taking the example of a major cultural investment in Germany, namely the renovation of Museum Folkwang prior to the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010, this article discusses the economic, social, symbolic and cognitive contributions of this investment to the economic transformation of the town and the Ruhr area, which is now one of the largest urban agglomerations in Europe. A Bilbao effect was not intended and did not take place. The museum, however, contributed to the incremental transformation of the town by creating a different image of the town, its role as a meeting place and point of identification for local elites and companies and its contribution to the emergence of an integrated cultural district.

Coalitions and Competition in Malaysia -Incremental Transformation of a Strong-party System

The seeming entrenchment of a two-coalition system in Malaysia solidifies the centrality of strongly institutionalised parties in the polity. The primary parties in Malaysia reach deeply into society and nest within dense networks of both intra-party and external organisations. Given this order -which differentiates Malaysia from its neighbours in the region – political liberalisation, if it happens, should be expected largely via electoral politics, and, specifically, through inter-party challenges. Indeed, the ideological and material premises of the emergent Pakatan Rakyat (People's Alliance) differ substantially from those of the long-standing Barisan Nasional (National Front), even as both pursue the same broad swathe of voters. This distinction reflects and furthers transformation in Malaysian politics, including not just a shift in the salience of communal identities and in policy proposals and issues, but also in patterns of political engagement both within and outside of parties, regardless of which coalition controls parliament.

Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism

Mahatma Gandhi is revered the world over for his views on freedom and nonviolence—ideas that he deployed with great success during India’s freedom struggle. As a thinker, he is commonly considered to have been a moral idealist: anti-utilitarian in mindset and deeply skeptical of market mechanisms. Yet, when he engaged with copyright law—as a writer, editor, and publisher—he routinely abjured the idealism of his abstract thinking in favor of a lawyerly pragmatism. Characterized by a nuanced understanding of copyright law and its conflicting normative goals, Gandhi’s thinking on copyright law reveals a reasoned, contextual, and incremental transformation over time, as the economic and political circumstances surrounding his engagement with copyright changed. In it we see a dimension of Gandhi’s thinking, emanating from his training in the common law, which has thus far been ignored. This Essay traces the development of Gandhi’s views on copyright to show how he anticipated several of the central debates that are the staple of today’s copyright wars, and developed an approach to dealing with copyright’s various problems—best described as “copyright pragmatism.” Revealing distinct similarities to both legal and philosophical pragmatism, copyright pragmatism critically engages with copyright as a legal institution on its own terms, examining its working contextually with an eye toward its various costs, benefits, and normative goals. The Essay then unpacks the analytical moves that copyright pragmatism entails to show how it holds important lessons for the future of copyright thinking and reform.

Brevity of haptic force perturbations induces heightened adaptive sensitivity

We have exposed human participants to both full-movement and pulsatile viscous force perturbations to study the effect of force duration on the incremental transformation of sensation into adaptation. Traditional views of movement biomechanics could suggest that pulsatile forces would largely be attenuated as stiffness and viscosity act as a natural low-pass filter. Sensory transduction, however, tends to react to changes in stimuli and therefore could underlie heightened sensitivity to briefer, pulsatile forces. Here, participants adapted within perturbation duration conditions in a manner proportionate to sensed force and positional errors. Across perturbation conditions, we found participants had greater adaptive sensitivity when experiencing pulsatile forces rather than full-movement forces. In a follow-up experiment, we employed error-clamped, force channel trials to determine changes in predictive force generation. We found that while participants learned to closely compensate for the amplitude and breadth of full-movement forces, they exhibited a persistent mismatch in amplitude and breadth between adapted motor output and experienced pulsatile forces. This mismatch could generate higher salience of error signals that contribute to heightened sensitivity to pulsatile forces.

A Group Identity Analysis of Organizations and Their Stakeholders: Porosity of Identity and Mobility of Attributes

I propose an ethnographic study on the incremental transformation of identity. Through an analysis of managerial perceptions of stakeholder influence, I suggest that identity is adaptive rather than enduring and that, to explain adaptive identity, group identity is more appropriate than an organizational identity perspective. The case study uses qualitative data collected in organizations manufacturing flavors and fragrances for the large consumer goods industries. The analysis reveals that attributes shared with clannish stakeholders gradually replace attributes of a claimed identity, and that, when confronting hostile stakeholders, organizations act in solidarity with clannish stakeholders. The discussion elaborates on the porosity of identity boundaries and the mobility of attributes, two important mechanisms that have emotional, behavioral, and strategic consequences.

The Survival and Return of Institutions: Examples from Pension Reforms in Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe

Opening a new phase in historical institutionalism, Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen show how a rigid dichotomy between incremental adaptation and radical transformation fails to capture important transformative processes common to advanced political economies. While their research focuses on gradual but radical transformation, the two authors leave open the interpretation of what constitutes abrupt, but only limited change. This article integrates their framework, defines what they call survival and return, and, within this genus, indicates two analytically distinct species: replication, where the old logic survives due to the redundancy of the new institutional arrangement; and reaction, where structural reforms generate demand for the old incentive structures, which are ultimately reintroduced. To elucidate the concepts, recent Croatian, Hungarian and Polish pension reforms are compared and their institutional instability analysed.

Reforming Korean Retirement Pension System in 2005 : In pursuit of Incremental Transformation through Layering?

Reforming Korean Retirement Pension System in 2005 : In pursuit of Incremental Transformation through Layering?

Kinematic transformations for planar multi‐directional pseudodynamic testing

AbstractThe pseudodynamic (PSD) test method imposes command displacements to a test structure for a given time step. The measured restoring forces and displaced position achieved in the test structure are then used to integrate the equations of motion to determine the command displacements for the next time step. Multi‐directional displacements of the test structure can introduce error in the measured restoring forces and displaced position. The subsequently determined command displacements will not be correct unless the effects of the multi‐directional displacements are considered. This paper presents two approaches for correcting kinematic errors in planar multi‐directional PSD testing, where the test structure is loaded through a rigid loading block. The first approach, referred to as the incremental kinematic transformation method, employs linear displacement transformations within each time step. The second method, referred to as the total kinematic transformation method, is based on accurate nonlinear displacement transformations. Using three displacement sensors and the trigonometric law of cosines, this second method enables the simultaneous nonlinear equations that express the motion of the loading block to be solved without using iteration. The formulation and example applications for each method are given. Results from numerical simulations and laboratory experiments show that the total transformation method maintains accuracy, while the incremental transformation method may accumulate error if the incremental rotation of the loading block is not small over the time step. A procedure for estimating the incremental error in the incremental kinematic transformation method is presented as a means to predict and possibly control the error. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multi-Dimensional Visualization of Bioinformatics Tools Classification and Its Transformation – For Quality Assessment

Bioinformatics aims at computing biology at molecular level where day to day discovery of enormous tools and techniques have been developed. These tools and techniques are involved in solving biological problem which involves data analysis and interpretation of accurate results. Some of the diverse analysis processes of theses developed tools are sequence analysis, functional analysis, structural analysis and similarity and homology analysis. In tools development various factors that are to be taken into consideration where quality plays a vital role from the view point of end users. Quality assessment of the tools is necessary before involving the tool utilization for major purpose. Assessment of tools quality has been considered based on the tools usage considering its features and functionalities. Tools evaluation by means of its features and functionalities is one of the major standards adopted. Visualized representation is more effective than any other modes of representation is profound one which have been adopted in this paper. A visualized model for tools classification and categorization based on its features and functionalities in multi-dimensional form have been symbolized. Here modes of tools classifications and categorization using its features and functionalities multi-dimensionally have been narrated. The adopted standard model will play vital role for pre-primary quality assessment for a large set of tools. Quality assessment is made on ten tools and results have been analyzed. The model adopted here is a standard which could be adopted for any tools in any area. calculation of atomic structures of double-helica l. Sequence Analysis tools includes database searches like text based search, sequence based search, motif based search, structure based search and various tools have also been developed. Since these tools and techniques in the area of bioinformatics are involved in solving real time biological problem with better decision making. Most of the bioinformatics related applications and tools utilize databases NCBI, PDB, EMBDL, Medline etc… which has been developed to share its resources. There is enormous development of tool for specific performance so it is necessary to carry out for a large set of tools to reduce to make selection of set of better tools based quality assessed. Since these tools are involved in solving real world biological problems, it is necessary carry out quality assessment before utilizing or involving the tool for major purpose. In this paper a visualized standard model for classifying and categorizing the tools features and functionalities have been represented based on various analysis and study made on bioinformatics tools. Apart from this the model mainly involves the representing the set of tools classifications multi-dimensionally which could be transformed. Primarily the multi-dimensional representation is done in 3-D as a starting point and slowly incremental transformation is made towards n-dimension. This model has been carried out as a pre-primary evaluation on large set of similar functionality tools in order to reduce the number of tools for best usage. In section II we represent the ways for classifying and categorizing based on the detailed study made on tools. In section III sample set of ten bioinformatics tools have been taken for representing classification and categorization of the